Friday, March 25, 2016

Staunton, March 25 – Duma members
said this week that they would like to transform the Federal Agency for
Nationality Affairs into a ministry for nationality affairs “with corresponding
financing, staffing and authority.”And Igor
Barinov, the agency’s head, acknowledged that he was “not against” such a step
(kommersant.ru/doc/2945148).

On the one hand, such a move seems
unlikely given budgetary stringency at the present time and given that such a
decision would be a kind of repudiation of Vladimir Putin who disbanded the ministry
of nationality affairs at the start of his first term and has been reluctant to
create a genuine replacement.

From the perspective of the Kremlin,
there is an even more fundamental problem in this sector. If a government
agency for nationality affairs is not given enough power to override other
ministries, it will be ineffective because it will not be able to intervene
successfully in the work of other agencies.

But if it is given such powers, such
an agency would amass so much power that it could threaten the freedom of action
of the powers that be, something it seems unlikely Putin would tolerate even if
Russians are saying that the absence of a nationality policy and of an agency
to carry it out carries with it threats to the future of the country.

Nonetheless, the Duma discussion and
Barinov’s apparent interest in encouraging the creation of a ministry for his
sector suggests that the Kremlin may decide that it has little choice to create
a ministry to give the impression that it is doing something even if the
country’s leaders are unwilling to give it the support such a bureaucracy would
need to be effective.

Staunton,
March 25 – The decision of Ingushetia head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov to “liquidate”
his republic’s Muslim spiritual directorate (MSD) calls attention to a much
broader and more serious problem: the Russian authorities are rapidly losing
control over the very institutions the tsarist and Soviet governments
established to control Muslim parishes.

Since
the end of Soviet times, Moscow has lost control of many of the roughly 10,000
Muslim parishes to radicals; but until very recently, it could rely on most of
the MSDs, even those set up independently of the Russian state in the 1990s, to
work with the secular authorities to promote “traditional Islam” and fight
extremism.

Now
that has changed: Islamist radicals have seized control of some MSDs, thus
limiting their utility to control Islamic parishes, leaving the Russian
authorities with the choice of ceding control of Muslim religious life entirely
to Muslims, replacing the radicals at the risk of radicalizing others, or
dispensing with the MSD system and creating something new.

Yevkurov’s
action in disbanding the MSD in order to remove a mufti he has been seeking to
oust since the end of last year highlights both the difficulties local
officials have in dealing with MSDs where radicals have seized control and the lack
of a Moscow policy in this area, according to Ruslan Gereyev, director of the
Center for Islamic Research in the North Caucasus.

Gereyev’s
words and his suggestion that it remains unclear what will happen next in the
MSDs either in Ingushetia or elsewhere in the Russian Federation are cited by
Vladislav Maltsev in an article in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta” (ng.ru/faith/2016-03-25/2_ingushetia.html).

Catherine the
Great created the predecessors of the MSDs after occupying Crimea to give the
Russian state an institution that could supervise and hopefully control all
Muslims in the empire. After the Bolshevik revolution, the MSD system decayed
and by the 1930s had been destroyed.

Then during and after World War II,
Stalin recreated the MSD system first in Ufa and later in Tashkent, Buinaksk
and Baku and ensured that those in these institutions were thoroughly vetted by
or even employees of the Soviet security services. Indeed, the heads of the
MSDs in most cases were reputed to have the rank of colonel in the KGB.

With the collapse of the USSR, there
were only two Soviet-era MSDs left within the Russian Federation, the Central
MSD located in Bashkortostan and the North Caucasian MSD in Daghestan.(The MSD in now independent Azerbaijan has
remained involved in the supervision of Shiites across the post-Soviet space
including Russia.)

These MSDs, however, were soon
joined by others organized by Muslims and government officials in non-Russian
republics. There are now more than 80 of them; and it is sometimes the case
that there are as many as six MSDs in a single republic or region, opening the
door to competition, mutual denunciations and a way to power for radicals.

Many Muslims in the post-Soviet
states wanted to do away with these institutions entirely given that they have
no basis in Islamic tradition or practice and because of their notorious
reputation especially in Soviet times.But the bureaucratic Russian tradition and the authorities desire to
have someone other than individual Muslim parishes to deal with has kept them
alive.

But now that radicals have seized
control of some MSDs, Russian thinking about these institutions may be
changing, especially given the fact that radical MSDs can hide from the Russian
state authorities the actions of individual parishes and can even promote the radicalization
of parishes that were not radical earlier.

If the Russian government as a whole
or individual non-Russian republics individually or collectively disband MSDs,
what might take their place? One possibility would be the restoration of the
Soviet-era institution of the Committee on Religious Affairs, a body that was
totally controlled by the KGB.

Another might be to allow Muslims in
Russia to operate at the parish level as Muslims do in most other countries
without any Christianity-like hierarchy over them.But at a time of increasing Muslim
radicalization, that seems unlikely – and so actions like those of Yevkurov are
increasingly likely without moving to disband all MSDs across the country.

At the very least, a new fight over
Muslim organizations and the role of MSDs is now brewing – and it is one that
Moscow so far has not offered much guidance that will allow regional
governments to defeat radicals. Indeed, Moscow’s silence so far appears likely
to make the situation more unstable at least in the short run.

Staunton, March 25 – Almost no
Russian official or pro-Kremlin commentator limited himself to expressions of
sympathy in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels, Igor Yakovenko says.
Instead, nearly all the representatives of the Russian establishment sought not
only to blame the victims but to exploit the attacks for Moscow’s political
gain.

This pattern, the Moscow commentator
says, both raises questions about how such people view the world around them
and both underscores and expands the growing gulf between Putin’s Russia, on
the one hand, and the countries of the democratic West, on the other (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=56F4CAC652801).

“Observing
the reaction of Russian politicians and media figures to the tragedy in
Brussels,” Yakovenko says, he “constantly has asked himself how such people
behave in their own families and among their friends. Do they at the funerals
of friends or relatives also declare that the person who had died is guilty in
his own death?”

But
that is exactly how Moscow commentators have responded to the Brussels tragedy,
he continues. “Practically none of the Russian representatives of the
establishment could limit themselves to simple sympathy, which is the normal
humanreaction to the death of people
and the suffering of those nearby.”

Instead,
in Russia’s public space, reactions ranged from “open happiness” at what
happened in the Belgian capital to claims of the “we told you so” variety and
statements that the Europeans can only defend themselves against terrorism if
they adopt measures like Vladimir Putin has and cooperate with Moscow on Moscow’s
terms.

Yakovenko
says this set of attitudes was prominently displayed on Wednesday on the
Politics program of Russia’s first channel hosted by Petr Tolstoy and Aleksandr
Gordon.“Naturally,” they gave the first
word on this subject to the outspoken and outrageous Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the
head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

“It
is extremely difficult to find someone who can at one and the same time pose as
an angry opposition figure, a loyal patriot, a convinced enemy of the West and
the real opposition, and at the same time who is 100 percent loyal to the authorities
and regularly collects the votes of the 10 percent of the supporters of a
caricature of fascism,” the commentator says.

Zhirinovsky
said on the program with regard to Brussels: “Europe is burning and let it
burn. One needs to be happy about this. No cooperation … We will declare
sanctions against them forever!”

After
that outburst, almost anyone else might appear to be a complete liberal.Certainly several of the other participants
on the show were less extreme, but a careful examination of their comments
shows that they were inclined in the same direction but were constrained from
expressing it so dramatically.

Thus,
for example, Petr Tolstoy, one of the hosts complained that Federica Mogerini,
the EU’s foreign minister, had made to reference in her press conference about the
Brussels tragedy to the losses Russia has suffered. “And he added that Europe
has been wrong about Russia for 25 years, “thinking that [it] has the right to
give [Moscow] advice.”

Other
participants, including military expert Igor Korotchenko, adopted a similar line,
something that showed that “the terrorist acts and the reaction to them had
displayed the gulf not only between the values of Europe and the Islamic world
but also between those of Europe and those of Russia,” Yakovenko continues.”

And
“this gulf between Europe and Russia became ever deeper” with the comments of
the participants of this program and of others in the Russia media over the
last few days.

In
an article in today’s “Novaya gazeta” entitled “The Apocalypse was Yesterday,” Aleksandr
Mineyev, that Moscow paper’s Brussels
correspondent, shows how that gulf is deepening and widening from the
perspective of Europe (novayagazeta.ru/politics/72382.html).

The
Brussels attacks, he says, have prompted the expert community in Brussels and
elsewhere in Europe to begin “a profound analysis” of why these attacks
happened and what must be done to prevent them in the future without
sacrificing the freedoms Europeans have long been accustomed to.

But none of
these analyses make any mention of Russia, Mineyev points out, or even
statements like those of Zhirinovsky.“For
Belgian and French experts and politicians, excluding persons like Marine Le
Pen, the terrorist acts in Brussels and earlier in Paris are not the subject of
geopolitics of the time of the Holy Alliance but a new internal problem of
Europe.”

“Belgium
gratefully received a delegation of the FBI from New York,” he notes, “but it
did not react to Russian calls to cooperate with its special services.Such cooperation on issues like terrorism
requires trust,” and “towards Russia after Crimea, ‘Novorossiya,’ and
Litvinenko,” that doesn’t exist and will take many years to restore.

“Russia is not
considered either a cause or a factor of the resolution of the problem of
terrorism in Europe.” For Belgium and the European Union, the main issue is “not
the struggle with ISIS and the role of Russia in the victory over this
terrorist organization.” Instead, it is maintaining the balance between the
struggle against terrorism and human rights.

Russians and
Europeans thus do not see the problem in the same way. “Perhaps,” Mineyev says,
“the problem is rooted in the mentality” of the two. “Judging from the Russian
media,” he concludes, “out compatriot is ready for ‘Crimea is ours’ to suffer
losses of a material and reputational kind.” The Europeans in contrast are not.